I often find that Google sends me to scam sites like Elsevier instead of Library Genesis or TPB when what I am searching for can be found there. Is there a better search engine out there that solves this problem?
Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates.
Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.
Asking, because last time I tried using it for more than a handful of queries, I ended up jumping back to using Google because searching for obscure programming error messages seldom led anywhere useful.
DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
So their bot is only for instant answers, and DDG is really just a metasearch engine? I'm a bit disappointed by that.
Might as well change to Searx then. It's also "just" a metasearch engine, but at least it's fully free/libre.
I wonder if there are any well-established free search engines that do their own crawling?
> Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.
I googled this, but couldn't find the "!" operator as a google operator. What does "!g" do in search? Or are you trying to say "I end up leaving Google for half my searches" which is not only shorter, but more clear than what you said.
Edit: Ah, that makes more sense, thanks guys. I completely misinterpreted that comment in two different ways.
Non-javascript: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
I find it better than Google for code / technical searches, and all things work related
I find it better than Google for historic or old content as Google barely acknowledges such content is possible any more. Admittedly DDG is "least worst" in this respect but it hasn't entirely thrown the results out with the obsession with recency and update frequency (I consider this to have essentially ruined Google). Google were better at this and dated searches in their first 2 years than now.
Google then ruined themselves further by feeling it can overrule my keywording attempts and gives a page of results featuring no result with the must have term. Adding insult to injury they proceed to heavily promote brands over small companies and blogs, or anything really.
Once a week I'll try !sp and not find what I need on Google either. The rare times I want video search Bing is orders of magnitude better than Google.
Right now I end up on SO or a handful of other forums depending on the subject.
Might be worth a shot if you say you get better results faster!
TL;DR I mostly find what I need quicker with least faffing around changing terms to try and fight them "knowing best".
Google shot themselves in the foot when they removed code search, and "improved" results by constantly knowing better with synonyms and other semantically linked results. It rather broke code searches and led to more of the wrong language turning up instead. Language reference and standard library type searches they do just fine at.
Google spoiled it for the obscure and code when even + and - modifiers and advanced searches became optional. They felt able to give a page of results with only one result having my must-have term. Makes searching for a specific release hellish - not everyone integrates latest and greatest v9 the week of its release. No, I really do want v7. I never fathomed the rationale of that change for anyone.
DDG do the least additional messing with my search terms with helpful expansion, pluralisation and so on. DDG got a little worse at obscure error searches when they started on some "oh you also meant" games fairly recently. They still do the least of this. There's still occasional cases where the content simply isn't there - but they're far better than say a year or two ago.
When I first tried DDG a few years ago I was !g or !sp all the time and it was barely worth the effort. Now I very rarely go near Google and don't feel I'm losing out.
I'd recommend giving it another try if you haven't recently.
This was my usual experience as well. But a few months ago, I started using tor-browser for laptop and orfox browser for mobile (equivalent of tor-browser, but for android) as my main browsers and couldn't use google search with them (search blocks tor).
I started using using ddg for almost everything and was surprised how good it was. I could launch firefox to use google, but almost never did it (except to use apps from G suite). I wonder also if in my latest previous attempts, I wasn't most of the time using "!g" because I wasn't trusting ddg results.
A while back i decided to put more effort and try to survive with !so, !gh, !hn, !r, !w, and a couple more depending on the context.
DDG may not give exact results in less than a second, but i believe that blindly giving priority to the fastest result is a critical issue, in many areas.
For the very niche topics, i basically maintain myself lists of sites.
I still use !g as fallback or when i'm too lazy. And also for pentest reconnaissance, i have a hard time seeing how to do it without Google honestly (which is scary).
Page load of DDG is not quite good indeed, but i don't mind let it a few seconds.
I have a Google CSE for the sites I have subscribed in RSS reader. It provides results that I could never get with straight Google search. Curious to know what your sources are like if you don't mind?
TBH, i mostly do all of that just because i don't want to be stuck deeper in the Google web, but that's more of a philisophical issue. I could easily live without all the DDG stuff, but not (yet) without all the Google stuff.
On the phone I switched back to google as default as inserting the !g was a horrible experience to go through every time I wanted to look something up quickly.
- No geo prioritization. If I'm searching for things in (city I'm current in) I don't care for sites from companies located in (city in the US/Canada with the same name).
- You write "X in Y" (generic example) and autocomplete tries to "fix it with "Z in Y" thanks but I really mean "X in Y". Or sometimes it tries to fix it with even more unrelated things (though sometimes it makes sense).
A geo-bubble is a filter bubble.
A filter bubble is building a story of previous searches to get more relevant results.
So the first time you search 'Python' on Google with no history it might prioritize snakes or the computer language, but after some clicks it will know better how to prioritize
Now, DDG correctly detects the country I'm in, but even with that set the results are weird and not always relevant.
Filtering my results based on my location is still a filter bubble. Filtering it based on anything, and not just showing me exactly the same results as everyone else who searched the same query is the definition of a filter bubble.
People who don't want to be bubbled use DDG. It's a big part of the reason it exists, and you want that changed. What you actually want is another search engine, which is probably Google since they have the most functional (in the sense of utility derived by the end user) filter bubbles.
Fotbolls vm
Football World Cup
The former gives you the correct site with the channels listed as the first answer but the second one doesn’t even have the channels on the first page.
It also detected that I'm in Poland and asked me if I want to switch to polish Google and filter results in polish language.
Somewhat strangely, when I use Qwant, I often get better results than Google. This is of course anecdotical evidence and I do not use Qwant all the time (creature of habit, and so on).
It’s good in combination with DuckDuckGo though, instead of the `!g` bang, you can do `!sp`
So it’s not just for pirate sites.
For books, I generally use Worldcat for search (DDG !worldcat), then hit http://b-ok.org (!b-ok).
For copyright-unconstrained works, Beatrice's old shop, The Internet Archive, is pretty awesome.
Archive.is often bypasses paywalls.
an extention that tries to find free legal hosted version of publications when you're reading, say a springer page (you'll see a green icon on your screen right's side).